Suleiman the Magnificent inherited the richest and best organized state of the sixteenth century, and in his first campaigns he took the fortresses that had defied even Mehmed the Conqueror. This episode, the second in our series, follows him to the two battles that defined the peak of Ottoman power in Europe.

On the twenty-ninth of August, fifteen twenty-six, on the marshy plain of Mohacs, the young King Louis the Second of Hungary rode out with the finest heavy cavalry in Christendom. Suleiman hid his cannon behind his own lines, chained them wheel to wheel, and let the knights charge into the trap. In less than two hours the army of Hungary was destroyed, two archbishops lay among the dead, and the twenty-year-old king drowned in a flooded stream as he fled the field. A kingdom that had stood for five centuries was shattered in a single afternoon, and Suleiman recorded it in his campaign diary in the same flat voice he used for the weather.

Three years later he marched farther into Europe than any sultan before him, all the way to Vienna, the Habsburg capital and the seat of his one true rival on the continent. But this time the enemy was not an army. A brutally wet year turned the roads to mud, and the great siege guns that had broken Belgrade sank and were left behind. His men reached the walls without the one weapon that took great fortresses, and as the cold came early and the food ran short, the greatest conqueror of the age lifted the siege and turned for home. He had found the limit of the sword, and it was made of weather.

This is the story of a man Europe called the Magnificent and his own people called Kanuni, the Lawgiver. It is about the cold genius of Mohacs, the doubleness of a conqueror who could spare the Knights of Rhodes one year and put prisoners to the sword the next, and the moment a ruler who could break a kingdom in an afternoon learned that conquest has an edge, and turned instead to the one thing that outlasts it: justice, and the law.

Sources include the Ottoman court chronicler Celalzade Mustafa, the historian and jurist Kemalpasazade and his account of the Mohacs campaign, the later Ottoman historian Ibrahim Pecevi, Suleiman's own campaign diary, and the modern work of Firas Alkhateeb and the Lost Islamic History project.

Content Warning: This episode describes sixteenth century warfare, including the mass killing of a defeated army, the execution of prisoners, and the drowning death of a young king.

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